My senior undergraduate research thesis was based on the illusions Dr. Kitaoka had constructed. I tested people's ability to perform tasks that required them to

My senior undergraduate research thesis was based on the illusions Dr. Kitaoka had constructed. I tested people's ability to perform tasks that required them to understand heightmap data given one of three randomly selected renderers: a top-down, completely flat map with no height rendering as a control; a similar rendering but with Akiyoshi's "A Bulge" illusion generated on the fly for each "hill"; and an isometric rendering where the hills were rendered in 2.5D. I was able to show that the illusion method was about 95% as effective at conveying heightmap data as the isometric map, while being no more computationally complex than the flat map. At the time (2005), it was one of the first direct uses of optical illusion in computer graphics. It was also one of the first papers to discuss the importance of changing graphics techniques to extend battery life on mobile devices. EDIT: forgot I had put up all my stuff into a Github repo a few years ago: https://github.com/capnmidnight/optical-illusions-in-cg/blob/master/final_draft.pdf https://github.com/capnmidnight/optical-illusions-in-cg/blob...